


Never Again

by fayedartmouth



Category: CHAOS (TV 2011)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Series, Speculation, Team Bonding, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-20
Updated: 2014-02-20
Packaged: 2018-01-13 04:29:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1212706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fayedartmouth/pseuds/fayedartmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Billy always fights until the fire burns too bright and darkness is all that’s left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Again

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Chaos.
> 
> A/N: This is random and pretty old. Beta by sockie1000

The fever grips him, holding him fast and helpless. Billy can feel it burning through him, tingling in his fingertips and pulsing through his spine. His heart throbs desperately to quench it, but it only adds fuel as he pulls in each uncertain breath. His head is the worst, and it feels like he’s being consumed from the inside out. It aches and pounds in equal turns, until he closes his eyes to escape it.

There’s no escape, though. In the dark, unconsciousness is uncertain and fleeting. He flits unbidden between the waking world and the next, driven by the demons in his newly created hell.

One minute, he’s writhing on the cot on their latest mission, the next he’s crying in the cupboard, begging to be let out. He pounds with his fists, begging and pleading for one more chance even as his father turns up the volume of the TV, leaving Billy’s cries lost in the darkness.

Then, he’s on the schoolyard, back against the wall. The boys are bigger than him, and there are three of them. Billy gives them all he has -- turns out his pockets and promises more tomorrow -- but it’s not enough. He gets off one punch before they clobber him, leaving him tucked up and sniffling to walk home alone.

He’s not there long, though, because he’s at his father’s funeral, standing stiffly in the rain. He wants to cry -- Lord knows his mother would never blame him, and no one would see it with the rain anyway -- but he can’t. His father would never approve, and Billy stares through the raindrops until he can’t see anything at all.

When he blinks, he’s in prep school. His teacher thinks he can do better than this, and Billy just laughs, crumples up the paper, not looking at the _F_ scrawled across the top. “Who says I want to?”

He gets an answer three years later when he tells Becky he loves her on the top of Calton Hill. She smiles, runs a hand over his cheek. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Billy.”

But Billy does. He makes promises and he lies and he wakes up on his first mission for MI6. He thinks, he’s made it, but when the knife slides into his flesh, he feels the blood well up and he thinks again.

He thinks again, of that last mission. Of the promises he made, of the fact that he was nobody saviour. His director sounds like his father, lecturing him on the porch when he got home from the schoolyard, “You have to save yourself, son. Nobody in this life will do it for you.”

His first night in the United States, he drinks everything in the minibar and turns out the lights, locking himself in the bathroom and crying as he pounds his fists helplessly, like he’s still a child in the cupboard. 

Even now, he begs and pleads, even if he doesn’t know who he’s fighting against. Still, he fights. Billy always fights until the fire burns too bright and darkness is all that’s left.

These fever dreams come and go, and Billy is at their mercy. But when he rouses enough, he feels Michael’s hand on his head, Rick’s quick assurances, and a soothing melody in Casey’s wavering voice. It’s a tenuous tug of war, his memories pulling him in one direction, his friends grounding him in another. In truth, it feels perilous this time, and Billy’s not sure what he has left to fight with.

That’s okay, though. Some promises are meant to be kept, and there are some things he still wants to prove. And this time, he doesn’t have to save himself.  
 _  
Never again,_ he thinks even as he slips precariously back toward darkness. Because there are demons in his hell, but he doesn’t have to fight them; he just has to survive.

And his team will do the rest.


End file.
